Charita Goshay: Time to re-evaluate how to treat mentally ill

Sunday

It’s time to stop being politically correct. There are cases in which some people with severe mental illness cannot function as outpatients.

The basic, bare-bones definition of news is this: It’s the same stuff, happening over and over again, to different people.

Last Christmas Eve, a woman suffering from schizophrenia walked into St. Peter’s Catholic Church in downtown Canton, Ohio, and tried to take a baby.

Earlier in the day, police had taken the woman to a crisis center, but she was released in accordance with the law.

The St. Peter’s incident wasn’t her first brush with police. She is what newsrooms call a “frequent flier,” someone with a long sheet of arrests for public disturbances.

On June 22, almost six months to the day, a Canton police officer was attacked and nearly killed in a Wal-Mart by David J. Carter, a bat wielding drifter who suffers from mental illness.

It’s time to stop being politically correct. There are cases in which some people with severe mental illness cannot function as outpatients.

David J. Carter had no business being out on the street.

No panacea

According to Canton Prosecutor Frank Forchione, Carter, who was convicted of threatening a park ranger with a knife last December in Washington, D.C., was supposed to be under supervision and on medication.

Instead, Carter, who is homeless, blindsided officer John Clark with a
baseball bat.

We know that in an overwhelmed and underfunded mental-health care system, people drop through the cracks like rain. But prison is not a panacea. Our jails have become de facto warehouses for the estimated 500,000 people who need treatment much more than they need to be incarcerated.

The American Psychiatric Association estimates that 700,000 people with mental illnesses pass through the criminal justice system every year.

Though 5 percent of Americans suffers from some form of mental illness, people with mental illnesses make up more than 20 percent of the state-prison populations -- 5 percent of whom qualify as psychotic.

In comparison, 55,000 people are hospitalized for mental illness, according to a 2005 PBS “Frontline” documentary that featured the Ohio Department of Corrections.

This time

No one wants mental-health treatment to return to the throwaway days of the “snake pit” insane asylum. Improvements in psychotropic drugs have enabled most people with mental illness to function perfectly fine. But we must re-evaluate our dwindling access to inpatient treatment for those who don’t have a good outpatient support system, or those whose families simply are overwhelmed.

As states continue to shrink funding for hospitalization, legislators need to realize that any money saved vanishes when someone with a mental illness is repeatedly churned through the criminal justice system.

This time, an armed and experienced police officer was the victim. The next time -- and there will be one -- the unsuspecting person being blindsided might be you.